Interviewing

SOCIAL MEDIA & BACKGROUND CHECKS

Why is this important? The Internet has given recruiters unprecedented access to job seeker information. Checking, for example, a candidate’s credit history or criminal record can be done quickly and cheaply through a variety of websites. Knowing what information is evaluated during background checks can help job seekers better prepare for the recruitment process.

Background Checks can be as informal as looking through a candidate’s social media or as formal as a credit and/or criminal background check.

SOCIAL MEDIA – What you should know…

We cannot stress enough the importance of scrubbing your social media presence before starting your job search AND monitoring it throughout the year.

Make sure to Google and Bing yourself. Look at text, images and video to make sure employers don’t see anything that could jeopardize your job search.

Finally, review the privacy policies on ALL of your social networks; a few minutes reading the “fine print” can save you hours of headache.

BACKGROUND CHECKS – What you should know…

The Internet has given recruiters unprecedented access to job seeker information. Checking a candidate’s credit history or criminal record, for example, can be done quickly and cheaply through a variety of websites.

Knowing what information is evaluated during background checks can help job seekers better prepare for the recruitment process. As such, we conducted a survey of over 200 fashion industry recruiters on their use of background checks. The high-lights of this survey are included below.

HIGH-LIGHTS:

Just under half of all fashion industry recruiters verify a job seeker’s work history before offering them a job.

About 18% of all fashion industry recruiters perform credit checks on potential employees.

Approximately 30% of all fashion industry recruiters verify a job seeker’s education credentials before making an offer.

Over 50% of all fashion industry recruiters perform a criminal background check before making an offer to a potential employee.

BONUS INFORMATION:

A surprisingly, high number of recruiters claim that fashion industry job seekers LIE during the recruitment/hiring process. The most common lie (by a wide margin) concerns compensation. Dates of employment and job titles were the second and third most commonly lied about items. View the poll results for more details: